


The Dreaming

by tzigane, Zaganthi (Caffiends)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-02
Updated: 2007-03-02
Packaged: 2017-10-24 06:22:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tzigane/pseuds/tzigane, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caffiends/pseuds/Zaganthi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Sickness came, they'd called it a great many things. At first, there had been laughter, joking references to Captain Tripps and the superflu, and then there'd been not so joking references to that and worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dreaming

It was the Dream again.

It had always come during sickness before -- fevers and chills, drowsiness, during periods when she wasn't well mentally by all accounts. By her own account, if she were honest about it, because there was no doubt that those times had come and gone, a chemical imbalance that made things difficult.

Now it came when she was well, except for the part where she just might be going insane.

The world was always tinted sickly yellow when the Dream came, and it was the same every time, or it used to be. She'd rise in the morning, and there were no dogs to let out, but the cats had taken over, coming out of the woodwork. The rabbits were out, too, munching in the garden as she tromped out to visit them.

To visit her dead.

She knew in the Dreaming that she'd buried them with her own hands. It hadn't taken so very long. She lived on a farm, after all. There had been a backhoe out at the old shop, one that belonged to her uncle Jim. She'd dug holes, eight of them, and she'd placed them all inside in the sheets from their sickbeds. First came her mother, and then her father, then her sisters, and their husbands, her niece. When she had made the trip back into the house for the last, it had taken longer. Admitting it was the worst part, she reckoned, even though it was just a Dream. She'd known it all in the Dream, known what it had taken to gather up the dogs once she'd buried her last relative, to take them out into the woods where the others rested, dead of old age instead of the Sickness.

Her Dream-self would lay bright pink crepe myrtle on the stones she'd piled up, dredged from down near the branch. Then she'd get up and go back inside, fetch her daddy's twenty-two and her brother-in-law's rifle, strap it across her back before she got onto her bike and rode. It was a four mile trip through an ochre-tinged world, one that took her into the tiny town and to the one church there with a bell tower. She never saw anyone else. There was just the Dream-knowledge that she could smell them, dead and rotting in their houses the way her own family was dead and rotting in the ground, feeding the garden the way it had once fed them. Once she arrived, she always tucked the bike into the vestry, and climbed into the tower, letting the windows open so that she could wait, and watch, and see.

No one ever came.

At least no one had ever come before, but since the Dream became Real, everything was different.

When the Sickness came, they'd called it a great many things. At first, there had been laughter, joking references to Captain Tripps and the superflu, and then there'd been not so joking references to that and worse. The world had fallen apart inside of a handful of weeks, nuclear bombs dropping in most of the bigger cities in Europe, all over China, India and Korea. The Middle East probably glowed in the dark from half the world away, she figured.

It had been the least of her worries.

She'd nursed them all, brought them home with her as they'd agree to come. Her mother had been the first to die, her cousin Laura the last. Her whimpered, fevered Dreamings had made it so hard to let go when the time came. The dogs had panted out their last breaths under her fingertips, alone on the couch in the summer heat, leaving her with nothing but the damned rabbits and the occasional wandering tomcat.

It wasn't a Dream anymore, but everything seemed dust-coated and boiled-yolk-dull all the same.

These days, she slept when she could, hacked in the garden when she couldn't. There had been an old well-pump out in the woods, one her grandfather had put back there fifty years before, something to do with the chickens he'd kept. It was enough for her, kept her in dishwater and wash water, which was better than nothing. She didn't make the trip into town, her Dream-self already knowing what the smell would be like, and that she wouldn't like it, not in the least. Instead, she worked on making the house winter-ready despite the heat that pervaded every moment, napping in the afternoon. There was all the time for reading she could ever want, and yet nothing she wanted to read.

Instead she dozed and she Dreamed.

In the Dreams, now, she waited in the bell tower. She waited, and no one came, but the breeze was nice, and she'd fall asleep in the Dreams before she could hear it, see it reflected in the window there. Sometimes, she was sure it was one of the Fair Folk, others a Fox-Wife, still others a sickened scarecrow, all white-pale skin and terrifying blue eyes. It was a Compulsion, the kind her grandmother had whispered of, the things that drove a person made like Old Man Henry the night he'd killed his wife and all but one of his children, bags packed when the community men arrived to find him sitting in their blood and waiting to be taken into town and put on the train for the madhouse.

 _Colorado_ , they always whispered. _You need to come to Colorado Springs._

_Come... or die._

She wanted to put it off as having read that damned book one time too many. She really did. It was growing, though, that absolute driving need, building up in her like a vicious black cancer. She didn't think she could hold it off for much longer.

No.

Not much longer at all.

~*~*~*~

There was always too much to be done and never enough energy to do it. He'd expected to make his mark on the world, but he hadn't expected to outlast it.

The last American and Russian presidents, the Secretary General of the UN, the British and Canadian Prime Ministers had all breathed their last breaths in another galaxy. They'd brought death with them, too, and that was the IOA's fault. Rodney had always hated them and their senseless policies, and hated that Elizabeth had listened to them that one last time. Her last time, last sad mistake. Carson had saved on the damage done by committing to an internal quarantine with no travel through the gate to other planets and none off planet until contact with Earth was completed. Then sterilization could begin properly, finishing what had been started with the disposal of their friend's bodies. Ronon had died quicker than Radek, quicker than half the scientists. Carson had said it was because of his healthy immune system, overreacting to the virus and flooding his lungs. That just made Rodney think of the Spanish influenza, and irony.

The Mexican president had survived and proven hale and healthy. He had no power over anything in the city, but he had the gene, and he knew how to organize, and there were more. There were people who never knew what they were, and they were coming home, slowly. One by one, all gene carriers. General O'Neill and Doctor Jackson, a few surviving members of the SGC, and any US military who (by proof of their continued existence) had the gene were screening survivors. There had been a few who'd had criminal records.

The rumor was that they were shot on sight. John joked that Atlantis wasn't going to become Australia. It was going to be beautiful again.

Rodney hoped that he lived to see that.

The artificial gene had taken in less than fifty percent. Carson had come to believe that it wasn't a matter of being artificial so much as it was a treatment that flipped a switch on a recessive gene, bringing it to life.

It was unfortunate that the Sickness, as the Earthers called it, didn't seem to recognize that.

The struggle was off and on, at best. The fever raged, the coughing, the vomiting of phlegm, all of it. Rodney had fought it off twice now, and he could feel it coming a third time. Carson was still working on a way to strengthen the gene in regards to the Sickness, but it wasn't coming. Not yet.

Rodney wasn't sure he could live through a third bout. He would try. Carson predicted that when -- not if, but when -- he shook it off that last time, he'd be in the clear. Teyla was recovering from her third attack of it, a little of the light coming back into her eyes. The Sickness had been confused by her DNA, Carson claimed, and somehow read Wraith DNA mingled into human as Ancient, as compliant enough to ATA that it wasn't a worry.

She lived where Ronon died. Sickness that targeted by genes made Rodney think of the Nanites, the Asurans, of endless ZedPMs and a world free of the Wraith. To be a machine and not suffer because of some insane rogue ascended Ancient that no one had struck down until it was too late... That would be heaven.

Now all he had were small stints of comfort and the hope that people he'd known on Earth had died quickly.

Jeannie.

Madison.

The new baby, and God, Carson's _mother_ , Radek's _son_ , Samantha _Carter_....

"Hey, buddy."

John. It was John, and he'd felt too bad to notice that he'd come off shift and slipped into their bedroom on quiet feet. It was theirs, and no one asked, and no one told, and no one _cared_ because they were all alive, at least, and that was all anybody could ask for these days.

He looked tired to Rodney, but it was no wonder. There were only five people with the gene strong enough to use the Chair, and Carson was so busy in the infirmary that he couldn't help them. They took six hour stints in which they opened the wormhole for thirty-eight minutes and then left it idle for thirty-eight more. During that time, the operator made the Call -- laughable, really, that thought. It was Atlantis amplified, tugging at the surviving ATA gene carriers still on Earth, pulling them towards Colorado and the station where a handful of staff members waited to show them to Pegasus. Kusanagi went on after John, and then O'Neill, and then it was Rodney's turn again. His gene was artificial, but it had taken strongly, stronger than the natural gene existed in most of the people on Atlantis these days.

"Skooch over."

He shifted, pressing the edge of his hip against the mattress for a long moment to get himself the leverage he needed to roll over, the motion started so he could get his elbow and hand against it, too. "How is it out there?" It wasn't just thinking the gate on; it was serving as a conduit. It was having one's mind opened wide to the agony of the dying on the First Planet. Not all the gene holders lived because there had been panic, and there was murder in that panic, and O'Neill had quipped that the planet was turning cold because all the little nuclear powers in the Middle East had taken it upon themselves to finish the apocalypse.

The only reason most of North America had gone un-nuked, he knew, was because the gate had spread the virus in the first place. It had started there and swelled outwards. By the time the panic had started in Europe and Asia, America was a nation of plague.

They had thought at first that it was the Ori; it was their modus operandi, so to speak. It seemed obvious that they'd been the ones.

There was obvious and then there was _obvious_ , though, and one of the things that had kept Carson so busy had been the study of the plague as much as helping the artificial gene carriers to survive it. While he still wasn't entirely certain how it had been done, he was very certain that it was a creation of the Alterans, meant to wipe out the races with which they felt they had failed. There were likely variations, ones that would destroy a variety of creatures but this one was aimed specifically at humans without a doubt.

John dropped the last of his uniform by the bed and crawled underneath the covers, curling around him. "'m tired," he mumbled into Rodney's neck, but his arm curled over Rodney's side, hand splaying over his breast bone and beginning to gently rub. "Everybody's tired. Got a new batch through at oh-three-hundred."

"Anyone we'd know?" His voice sounded raw to his own ears, a low whisper in the dark. It was easy for Rodney to shift, to move a hand to touch John, to leech warmth from him. He was always sore and always tired and always on one edge of sick or another.

"Nah. Most people coming out of the west. California, Washington. A guy from Vegas. DNA expert, so Carson'll at least have a little more help." Over half the medical staff had lacked the gene, and the ones with the most experience in DNA extraction and genetic manipulation were gone. "Nobody... nobody we know." Nobody they'd heard of, not part of the program, not Rodney's family, and he knew how slim the chances were. The probability of even one of them surviving was astronomical. He knew. He just didn't know how to face it, not when everything else was so hard.

He held onto the hope because they had the gene in their blood. The rare hope, and he knew that the city was John's hope. John's family... some of them deserved what had happened. Rodney wasn't going to lie to himself. He wasn't going to claim that he was a better man than he actually was. "DNA experts are good."

"Yeah, well. He's kind of shell-shocked." Everybody was, some more so than others. John's mouth against his skin felt good, felt sweet, and it almost made the faint nausea of rising sickness better. He was so cold now, all the time. "He'll get over it." Everybody would. They would have to or there was no point, was there? "How you feeling?"

"Not so hot." He wanted to say like hell, but Hell had a great many more meanings than it had used to. And it was tempered, soothed down by things like the way John's lips lingered at the side of his neck, calming him.

Rodney felt John shift, and he couldn't quite manage to hold himself on his side without that support. "You're coming down with it again."

Third time was the charm if it didn't kill him. He didn't want to be sick again. The swellings, the desperate drowning in his own lungs, the fever. Rodney had hoped it wouldn't happen again. He'd known better, of course, but.... He'd hoped.

"Carson thinks so." And Rodney thought so. He'd need to rest more in his down time, fight to survive, but there was nothing else for him to do. Carson would treat him; treat the symptoms so he didn't cough so hard, so he didn't dehydrate. That would last for a few days. Then, if they were lucky, he'd go to the infirmary and come out a survivor.

If they were lucky.

Rodney was afraid that they wouldn't be.

~*~*~*~

The Dreaming didn't stop. It just kept on and kept on, and she knew she would never make it before winter set in hard if she didn't get up and go. The bicycle of the Dreaming wouldn't be enough. She'd have to take a car, map out the back roads, and figure out how to get gas from pumps gone dead as electricity went out all over the world.

Before she went, she stopped by each house.

Her mother's canned goods came first -- beans, squash, pears. Better to eat things that she knew about than things she didn't. Her grandmother's quilts were at her baby sister's. The handmade ragdoll she had bought when her niece was born still lay flopped on the floor beside the tiny toddler bed when she made her next stop.

Laura had brought everything important when she had come home with her to die. No stops needed to be made for those mementos.

Her own car was tiny and old. It got good gas mileage, but it was better to take the small SUV parked beside the baby swing in her sister's back yard. She was careful to siphon out the gas from all of the other vehicles, filling five-gallon gas cans until she ran out and then making a trip to Uncle Jim's packing shed. There were more containers there, and a couple of old-fashioned gas tanks full of the dyed gasoline sold for farm use. Her grandfather had kept one in the back of his old Chevy for fueling tractors in the field, and she would have given anything to have that with her now, or at least one more person to try and wrangle a tank into one of the trucks. Lacking those things, she did what she could. The SUV smelled like hell when she was done, but there was enough gas for several days of driving, even if it would be dangerous.

She took the time to remove the old hand pump, just in case she couldn't find anything like it on the way, and went home one last time.

That night, she only Dreamed of the Fae, and the Fox-Wife.

The next morning, she set out alone.

~*~*~*~

"I'm afraid we're going to lose him, John. Best to prepare yourself."

Jesus.

Jesus, Carson wouldn't say it if it wasn't damn near a hundred percent likely, and John slammed his head back against the wall to see if it could compensate, draw some of the pain away from his chest and the pit of his belly that felt like dying.

They'd lost a lot of people in the first wave -- everybody without the gene, a few of the artificial carriers. Most of the artificials had come through round two sick and miserable, like Rodney, but they'd all made it through the third Sickness -- if not easily, then at least they'd come through.

"We can't. Can't you do something for him?" Carson was, he knew, but he wanted to hear it, wanted to hear it for himself. Needed to, and if Carson would just lie to him, if Carson would just give him something to hold onto... He wanted it. He wanted whatever he could get so that he could go on, get back in the fucking chair, keep Calling, keep doing whatever he had to do.

He couldn't do that without Rodney.

"I can keep him comfortable. I'll keep treating him the way I have been, keep pumping him full of antipyretics, steroids for the inflammation, keep him on oxygen. There's an expectorant, and that's helping with the phlegm, but he's practically vomiting it now." Carson sat down, put his head in his hands. "I'm sorry, John. So sorry."

Comfortable wasn't good enough. Comfortable meant a slow death, meant that Rodney would be the first one not to live through the third bout of it. They, the city, didn't need that kind of morale hit, and he needed Rodney to be there. He needed his brains and his personality and his body, but the virus didn't seem to care.

"Can you give him the retrovirus again?"

"Under the circumstances...."

"I don't care about the circumstances!" He didn't. Didn't give a shit about them. He just wanted Rodney to live. He wanted -- "He has to _live_."

Carson took a deep breath. "I'm afraid that if I did, he'd die all the more quickly."

"But, it's the gene, he'd have more of it..." That was why the Virus stopped attacking, and it made sense to him.

"It'll imbalance everything that's going on with him right now, John, make it all worse. I'm afraid if we start messing about with his genes, there'll be worse ramifications. He might suffer the Sickness three times more, and his body won't be able to take that." Carson sighed. "There's nothing to do except wait and see."

And make up for his shifts in the Chair. They were still gating supplies in while they Called, culling the planet of all of its Ancient technology, naqadah, weapons, equipment, supplies. Making it possible for life to flourish on the surface of the planet, farming supplies. No seeds, though. Teyla had been right, and the native foods were strange to them, but grew better there. They didn't need genetically modified corn killing out an ecosystem or something.

"I want to see him."

"Are y'sure?" Carson sounded so tired, and it was obviously hurting him like hell. Why shouldn't it? It was hurting John worse, but Carson had been friends with Rodney for a long time. "We're tenting him for the oxygen, John. You won't be able to get close."

"I don't care. I want to see him." Never mind that he did care. That he'd just laid down beside Rodney two shifts in the chair previous, that he'd curled close and listened to his slowly labored breaths in the night. And then Rodney had passed out during his turn in the Chair.

It hadn't been pretty.

Carson nodded, though he seemed reluctant. There hadn't been requests like that with the first wave, nor so much with the second. Everyone felt safer now. "I know."

He stood up and John could tell he'd lost weight. He knew what this was taking out of him, not just in the loss of friends, but also in the loss of colleagues. Biro had been the first to go, then Keller, then Harris and Singhal. He was only one man, and there just weren't enough doctors anymore. They were lucky he'd been one of the gene carriers.

They were lucky that there was at least one more man running around the lab to help Carson, one of the still-shocked newcomers. Soon they'd clear that hurdle, and life would get easier as the last lingering few either healed or died. It had almost passed. Rodney was almost passed.

John clenched his jaw a little as he followed Carson into the ward that had been created to deal with those who came down with it the second and the third time.

There weren't a lot of them left. Too many, really, and they were all from the original trip to Atlantis. Kavanaugh was getting better in one corner, and they were pulling a sheet over Simpson's face in another.

In an hour, or four, or a day, it'd be Rodney. When that happened, John thought he might just blow his brains out down on the South pier.

The world had gone to hell. Six billion people had been reduced to maybe 200,000. That was according to Doctor Jackson's ambitious calculations, his willful blindness to the fact that the Middle East and Europe had nuked themselves right off the map, and that the likelihood of groups from those countries getting to Colorado with the limited transit options remaining was pretty slim.

They'd still try. He knew they'd try, but they might have to try without him, because Rodney was weak and vaguely green-tinted, cheeks flushed a burning red.

"Hey, buddy," he said softly. He knew it wouldn't make any difference. He could have called him a smart-mouthed jackass and Rodney wouldn't know, would only babble back to him with fevered tongue. "You're looking kind of rough here."

There was a chair, and John sank into it, taking Rodney's thin pale hand in his own and holding it with a tenderness that spoke more than anything of what lay between them.

 _Don't Ask, Don't Tell_ didn't matter when there was no military structure left. He was lucky that he'd always run a good, tight place, and that his marines were respected by the civilians and the other way around because it helped things stay stable. It helped people cooperate and listen to him because the infrastructure was re-forming around the gaps that death had left behind.

If Rodney died, Kavanaugh really was next in line. It was one of a hundred different reasons why he needed Rodney to live. Kavanaugh was a pain in the ass, no matter how smart he was or how good he was. He would never be John's choice of replacement and he couldn't just shake up the remaining command structure by slotting in Dr. Jackson. Who knew when that idiot might Ascend again, anyway? O'Neill had declined to make changes to things, mostly because he said there wasn't any point anyway. It was all fresh from the beginning on out, and the Lanteans at least should have some kind of familiarity, something to cling to.

"....'s, no. No," Rodney mumbled under the tent. "'s, there's snakes. Snakes. Got. Got. No. Thirsty. 'm thirsty."

He wasn't sure if Rodney was really thirsty, or if he just was thirsty in his dream, but he twisted, looking for sign of Carson or someone else who could tell him if it was okay to give Rodney a drink. There were ice chips in a cup beside most of the beds, but he didn't see any for Rodney, so he fumbled until he found the call button and waited.

"Maddie?" Rodney asked. "I forgot the present. Snakes in the...."

"It's gonna be okay," John promised him. "I'll get the present. No snakes. There aren't any left."

The Goa'uld had been weak, too accustomed to their Tauri'i servants. Even they couldn't keep their hosts from dying, and while they could have used non-human hosts, they'd grown lazy, content. Their whole structure, from what John understood, had rested on the backs of human slave-servants. At least one enemy was dead.

He'd worry about the Wraith some other time.

"But there's..." Rodney's voice slipped, slurred into a thick cough. It sounded as if he were going to choke on it, so John took hold of himself and pushed up the plastic of the oxygen tent, rolled him onto his side and firmly hit him on the back on either side of his spine.

Green-grey mucus poured out of his mouth like a spill of vomit, and John could feel his stomach turn. He didn't stop until Rodney's coughing eased and his breathing got better.

Someone would come by to mop it up. He kept Rodney on his side, but eased him back from the gunk that had been clogging his breathing. Then he rubbed at his back, trying to soothe away the last stuttered coughs.

He wasn't surprised when it was Carson who came at his call, finally, though the expression on his face was strangely pleased for a man faced with something that disgusting. "Oh. Oh, that's excellent, John. We'd not been able to get it out of him. If you'd help me change the sheets and Rodney around that, I'd appreciate it. Then we can get him back under the oxygen."

"Not a problem, Doc." He wiped the side of Rodney's mouth with the edge of the sheet, and shifted to pull Rodney up, to lift him mostly off the bed so Beckett could strip the bed. "I can stay here and keep an eye on him until I go back to the Chair."

Carson shook his head. "John. You need your own rest. It'd be good to have someone with him, but if you wear yourself down, it's no better, and it won't be that much of a help. We've got volunteers..."

"If he..." John lifted him a little closer, more than he reasonably needed to, but Rodney was loose and pliant in his arms, and mumbling about snakes again. "I just need to be here."

The way Carson softened was undeniable. It made John feel somewhat guilty for manipulating him. "Aye, son. I know. I'll see about getting another bed in so you can stay close, then." Simpson wouldn't be needing hers, in any case. John could bunk there if he had to. They'd gotten used to sharing with the dead when they'd been alone in Pegasus.

"Thanks. I don't want to be a burden down here, Doc, just... You know." He knew, knew before most other people had known because Rodney babbled sometimes and sometimes injuries brought out things on people's faces. Familiarity. They were no secret, but they were always subtle in public. John had never been a man for public displays of affection, even with hot women.

Mostly those just kind of flew over his head anyway.

"You're all wearing yourselves out with the Calling. I probably ought to have all of you down here under regular sedation." It was probably supposed to be a joke, all things considered. It just didn't come off that way, not quite, because it was a little too true. "There we go. Sheets off, gown off." Rodney was shivering all over, but Carson moved to a cabinet and pulled out fresh everything. He came back with it, bundling one of the blankets over him carefully to contain the mess from what he'd spewed. "Now that you've managed to get the gunk out, maybe he'll get better, a bit."

Carson was doling out faint hope, but it was enough. He helped wrap Rodney tight, gown and blanket close to his body while Carson hurriedly changed the sheets. "But as long as we keep doing it, more people keep arriving. Carson, we need help out here and this is how to get it."

"Aye, well, I'm still more than a wee bit worried about the ones who come in who aren't suited to be here."

There had been a few incidents, and as such there were a hell of a lot of new protocols in place even if they weren't changing their command structure. Most people were heading straight out to the mainland since somebody had touched what was definitely the wrong thing and almost blown them all to hell and back. Then there were the ones with criminal histories, some of them bad enough that they were actually backed up in the files the SGC had started storing when it had become obvious what was going on.

John didn't have to tell Carson what happened to them. Carson could guess. Rodney knew, but Rodney quietly approved of the plan -- it was bad enough according to Rodney that they were out there now and that humanity as they knew it was gone. But for them to have to deal with murderers and shell shocked members of the Trust? No, that was unacceptable to most members of the expedition. Elizabeth would have protested, but Elizabeth had brought death to Atlantis.

It was pretty grim, but Jack just said that was what he got paid for. Then he'd smile that crazy Jack smile, the one that made John wonder how he'd managed to get to general instead of the proverbial section eight.

"Maybe if you stop, just for a day or two. Just long enough to rest." Carson probably thought Jack and Miko were as tired as he was. They hadn't been half-sleeping, though, scared Rodney would get sick again, scared he'd die on them.

"We might cut back on how often we open it. I don't know. I'll talk with the others, after..." After Rodney. They were down a man to start with and he didn't want to think hard on how dire Rodney was, that Carson was checking the edges of the oxygen tent one last time, just to be sure.

He moved to John, then, shifting Rodney carefully in his arms while he changed him into a new cotton gown. They'd given up on scrubs with the first of the Sickness, probably because it was easier to get the gowns off of corpses. "Aye. After you rest, Colonel. There's plenty of time. Besides, maybe we'll be lucky now that Rodney's got some of the glue out of him."

Maybe. "Sure. I'll just rest right..." He gestured with his chin to the nearest bed that he was going to drag over towards Rodney's when Carson wasn't looking. "There, Doc."

Carson nodded. He was likely as exhausted as the rest of them, but there was nothing else to do for it. He had his job, just like they had theirs. "You do that. Don't make me come down and give you something to help with it." He only tied the strings at the top of the gown, and then he helped John to manhandle Rodney back under the tent. His respiration was easier, now, and the bed was resting up so that he could breathe a little better.

Every lungful of air was important. Every inhale and exhale, they were precious to John. It meant that there would be a few more moments of Rodney being okay, meant that he'd lived a little longer and there was a better chance that he'd survive the third bout. All he had to do was live through it, and he'd be all right. Everything would be all right.

If he believed in God at this point, he'd beg for it.

_Please. Just let him live._

~*~*~*~

The hardest parts were the towns.

She could smell them from miles away, or thought that she could, so she avoided them. It was easier, and not just because they made her gag. Mostly it was easier because traffic had stalled on all of the larger highways going out of town, so she'd stop at tiny country stores, try not to breathe on her way inside, fumble her way through until she found county maps, then slide out again, shaking and afraid.

The Dreams were coming less and less often -- mostly the Fox-Wife and someone she hadn't seen before. He reminded her of one of her father's cousins, the one that everyone jokingly teased about, murmuring to one another that his mother had dropped him on his head as a child. They never said it in front of him, so there was probably more truth to that than anyone wanted to admit to the second generation.

She'd taken to calling him Bubby all the same.

The entire state of Kentucky had smelled like three-day-dead road kill fried on a stick. Illinois and Missouri had been a little better, but not by much.

Her third day of picking her way across the state was the first time since Laura had died that she saw anyone human that was living.

It was a shock, actually. She had gotten the idea that her Dreams were true, the ones where she waited and no one came. It hadn't really occurred to her that the waiting itself was the reason she was always alone.

She had lived. Logic implied that someone else obviously lived as well, and that was a shock. Weird.

The SUV had broken down along the way. She'd been in the middle of nowhere, and she hadn't known what was wrong with it. Brand new vehicle, and it had broken down so that she'd cussed it, thrown rocks at it, and wanted to kick it. She'd been afraid she would break something, so she hadn't. Instead she'd gathered the handful of small mementoes she couldn't live without and she'd started trudging west. After walking for a couple of days, she'd managed to find another farm and a house with a tiny Ford Ranger, one of the small ones with a manual transmission. It had enough gas to get a little further, so she'd made the effort to find another of the older gas tanks. Thank God she was still in farm country.

She was heading into Kansas on a back dirt road when she saw them -- a man with red hair and a little girl with a smudged, dirty face and tangled hair. She knew she should stop, and she was scared as hell to do it.

She did it anyway, and made sure that the safety was off the twenty-two when she did. It might not be good for much more than shooting wood rats, but without doctors, it'd kill a man.

Eventually.

~*~*~*~

It figured that plague would be what would finally get the SGC to use Atlantis to its full potential.

He'd always said that if they had more than a skeleton crew in the city, they could've accomplished a lot. The city took them in easily, and the mainland, because clearly Lantea didn't discriminate against Terrans the way a lot of places did. It seemed to welcome them.

That was why Jack made it his job, as he went between the sides, Earth and Atlantis, to keep the incomers clean. They didn't see what he saw back Earthside. They didn't see the ruin; the shambles society had ground to, death and death and death except for those with the gene.

They didn't see what some of those guys with the gene and the right history had done to people who had it and weren't expecting them.

Jack didn't like having to kill people. He didn't like suspecting them before they had done something.

He had hated the motherfuckers he'd found holed up in a hotel with eight women, two boys and three little girls, beating and torturing them every night, raping whatever hole came handy.

Since then, he'd tried to at least keep the shootings out on the South Pier. Daniel wouldn't let him go back through the Gate to take care of it on Earth. Those whale things McKay discovered were pretty friendly with the city, still, and the ones that strayed close liked to snatch up the floating bodies off the surface of the sea.

At least those folks were doing some kind of good, postmortem. Whale food.

But for the people who hadn't gotten through it unscathed, the best they could do was settle them on the mainland and kind of cross their fingers. Not many people whose goal in life was to be a therapist apparently had the gene. Maybe it went hand in hand with it. The Ancients had been real bastards, and it seemed to breed true, at least as far as that went. None of the base psychs had survived, and the one from Atlantis had been kind of flaky. Hell. Everybody who had gone to Atlantis that first year had been kind of flaky once it got down to the nitty gritty.

"Jack!" Daniel always seemed a little surprised to see him, even when he was the one who'd come looking for Jack. It was kind of funny. "You won't believe what we found two levels down."

"Does it start with a 'z' and end with an 'm'?" He asked it because they needed them. He'd be happy when they had a room full of them stacked up like cordwood. It was probably some tablet he'd translated and fallen in love with.

The pale blue of startled gaze met his. "Um, no, although, you know, we're still looking. For that. No, no, this is actually, ah, it's a database. One that's been kept separate from all of the other databases, one specifically dealing with the Sickness. Jack. It's all there. All of it."

"Wait. Wait. Our sickness? Our, born and spread in the Milky Way sickness has a database _here_?" Unless Daniel meant the Ancient plague, which was a bit different since that had left the Ancients dead and the humans all right and this was the exact, horrifying opposite.

He was nodding, though, and Jack could feel sickness welling up in him. "Yes, yes, _our_ Sickness. They must have brought it with them, Jack, must have intended to use it if everything went wrong and they wanted to start over because it would kill everyone without the gene, host, Goa'uld, everyone. Not the Wraith, obviously, so it would have been useless in this galaxy, but..."

"Is there anything useful in the database? Like a _cure_? Because we've got a couple of guys who could really do with it..." McKay. McKay and Sheppard, if he defined both of those couple of guys. If McKay died, Sheppard... was a danger to the city.

To himself.

Daniel gave a little grimace, his expression apologetic. "Well, not so much with the cure part, at least not yet. I'm still going through the database. Most of the linguists are gone, and I really could have used Elizabeth's help on this."

"Yeah, well. We can't all have what we want." Jack shrugged his shoulders, and sat up in the chair. Daniel looked stretched thin, tired. "C'mon. We can let it rest for a little while."

Long enough for Daniel to pull himself back together; get enough sleep to translate some more. Maybe there would be a cure. Maybe they wouldn't have to face what would happen if McKay died.

Maybe those two-headed sharks would start to prefer Wraith for lunch, too.

"Yeah, well, if I could just look at this again, maybe another hour or so...."

"You'll look at it better after sleep." He said it firmly, so there was no wiggle room. Daniel was like a six year old that way, and Jack had been there, handled that age just fine before.

He wasn't going to think about Charlie, or the convincing it had taken to get him to go to bed on time.

"But Jack, I just want..."

Yeah, yeah, it was pretty obvious exactly what he wanted. Jack took him by the arm and began to steer him towards the sleeping quarters. "Sleep. Sleep, and you'll be able to decipher it in the morning."

"Yeah, but time is important."

If McKay didn't survive to see the morning then he wouldn't have been strong enough for them to try anything the database could've given. "So is sleep." Restful sleep, even if he had to slip something into Daniel's tea. It had become a bigger necessity of late than it used to be.

"Okay. Okay, I give in, I just." Daniel gave a heavy sigh. "I'm afraid if I sleep, McKay will die, and if McKay dies, I think maybe Sheppard and Atlantis -- well, they might go a little crazy." Daniel knew from crazy. He'd seen Jack in that state a time or six.

"They might." There was no point in lying as he followed after Daniel. "But you know, guys come out of crazy sometimes in better shape than they were in when they went into it." It wasn't soothing, but maybe Daniel would think on it.

Maybe he'd find an answer tomorrow, and they wouldn't have to start standing down in shifts to preserve the people who could actually run the chair. It wasn't like they didn't have plenty of ZPMs since the _Odyssey_ had been in port. There had barely been enough by way of crew to fly the thing, but they'd made it to Pegasus all the same, leaving two full modules for Atlantis.

"Maybe. I just don't think that'll be the case with Sheppard."

"Then just hope. And get some sleep." He clapped Daniel on the shoulder, and decided that if McKay died, he might need to take Sheppard to the east pier.

At least then he wouldn't have his blood mingling with that of criminals.

~*~*~*~

The redhead turned out to be Jimmy Olsen. His parents had a terrible sense of humor, and the red hair had never really faded enough to make the source of his name less than immediately obvious. The little girl didn't say much. She just clung to his hand and waited to see what she would do.

She invited them to come with her. After all, the little girl seemed to trust him, so she might as well do the same.

When she introduced herself, it was almost a surprise to say her name out loud. It had been a long time since she'd been anything except by herself, whole weeks that slipped by and made her forget anything except the trauma that scattered all of the countryside.

"Cheyenne," she'd said, giving a deprecating smile. "My parents had a sense of humor. I had sisters named Denver and Montgomery. I'm just glad they didn't go for Atlanta."

Hearing her voice had been a trauma in and of itself. She hadn't talked, not since she'd left home. She'd picked up an already loaded battery-operated mp3 player at her sister's, and taken batteries whenever she stopped for maps. While she was still used to voices, it was the soothing background noise of it, not her own, not the way it sounded in her own head.

But if it meant anything, at least she hadn't started to talk to herself.

They were good people. The girl was quiet. Jimmy said that the only thing she would say to him was that she had come from Toronto and that she was looking for her uncle in America. God knew how she'd crossed what was left of the border on her own or gotten that far without something picking her off, but she had. It made Cheyenne feel better about having stopped to get them.

Even a little companionship, the quiet kind, was better than corpses.

~*~*~*~

He felt like warmed over shit.

Rodney had always secretly wondered about that phrase. Warmed over anything -- shit, death, whatever phrase a person chose -- just didn't seem even remotely logical. On the other hand, people feeling the way he did probably weren't.

He was alive, John stressed. He was alive and coherent, and that was supposed to fill him with a flood of hope, when all it really meant was that Carson came to the room four times a day, made him eat food that tasted putridly healthy, and warned him that he'd get carpal tunnel working on the computer as fast as he was.

They'd fallen behind, though, and there was still work to be done, so much work. The people coming into Colorado Springs had dwindled down to a bare trickle. There was talk of leaving a small staff behind for the winter, enough to gather whoever else came and then making one last full trip before the _Odyssey_ went back to the Milky Way to get the ZedPM.

It felt a lot like abandonment.

He wasn't sure what he thought of it, of doing that. They couldn't devote their resources to eternally keeping the gate open; already that contact was dwindling, the shift times widening with just the three taking turns. He supposed it was, no, knew that it was the best decision. He was still leery, unwilling to properly declare Earth Done-with-a-capital-D.

He had hoped that Jeannie would be one of the survivors, even though he had suspected _(known)_ that she didn't have the full gene any more than he had before the therapy. If she had just agreed to have it, stopped being angry about big business and big government, then maybe...

Maybe nothing, he thought, and leaned back, closing his eyes. She hadn't come into Colorado. Kaleb hadn't. None of the kids had. Just a lot of strangers, and now they had a population too big for the city, too stupid to use it, and a hell of a lot of Wraith still in the Pegasus galaxy.

They were still fucked, only they were fucked in fewer ways. The Ori were going to be miserably surprised that Earth was gone, but they'd move on. He supposed they'd reach Pegasus in a few hundred generations and everyone would die then.

Rodney closed his eyes, slouched back in bed, and hugged his laptop to his chest.

"Hey. For a guy who's gonna live, you're looking kind of rough." John's voice was enough to make Rodney sigh and open his eyes, looking up into those hazel-green eyes and feeling at least a small wash of gratefulness. He was alive and he had John. That was definitely enough to live for, no matter how depressed the rest of it made him.

He could go on as long as he had that. A few friends who'd survived, John, and the city, a city of wonder, a city that was blooming under a population made up of idiocy. "Feeling kind of rough." His voice sounded thick with mucus still, but he wasn't swimming in it. It was more like summer cold sickness. It was something he could live with.

Literally.

"Yeah, well, Carson said he'd let you go if I promised to go home with you and get some rest, maybe help you get a bath." John smirked. "Rumor has it they can smell you all the way out in the hall."

"Bath." He moaned a little, opening his eyes. John was smiling. "Do we have soap? Good soap, not that stuff that Teyla makes with the lye and the goat-rabbit fat..." They hadn't even had that because Carson had wisely locked down on trading, but it made everything smell like pine to Rodney.

The sheer happiness John seemed to radiate was disgusting. Rodney loved it. "We sent a couple of small units of Marines back through the wormhole. They brought back a lot of really great stuff, up to and including good soap and shampoo and _hair gel_."

"Robbing abandoned Wal*Marts." Last testament to the oddities of humanity. Rodney shifted, let his laptop slip to rest on his lap, and started to sit up. The shuff of fabric against his skin made him concentrate harder, made him have to think. He was alive. He was alive and the people who'd worked in those Wal*Marts weren't, so he might as well enjoy his life while he still had it. "I knew they trained them for something."

"Hey. Don't knock the Marines. _Soap_ ," John reiterated, offering him an arm even as he took the laptop with his other hand. "C'mon. Rumor also has it there's this guy who's missed you a lot and has plans for getting a smile or three out of you."

"How long've I been sick this time?" He reached for John's arm. John's healthy, strong arm, which he could lust over to his heart's content since _Don't Ask_ and fraternization rules were out the window. There wasn't much point in having them when they'd reached the End of the World as We Know It, to put not too fine an edge on things.

He was standing before John would tell him. "A little over two weeks, in and out. We thought we'd lost you a couple of times." There were vague memories, puking up fluid that he'd swallowed, or worse yet, coughing up the nasty gunk that filled his lungs. The third time had been harder on him than the first two.

He supposed he was tired of it, tired of trying, tired of fighting it. Now, though, now if he got some rest, and after reading what those idiots had been up to in two weeks without him, he could put in a good effort to get better. He could stand close to John, sidle in to touch him and reassure himself that John was healthy. Not just healthy, but the healthiest person on the base, probably. "I thought I'd lost me, too."

"Yeah." Yeah, and John leaned in, kissed the end of his nose, and then his mouth, and that was so completely love. Nobody who wasn't in love would kiss a guy as grungy and smelly as Rodney. "C'mon. I promised Carson I'd take you out in a wheelchair, but if we hurry, we'll miss him." That was love, too. Rodney hated wheelchairs.

Then again, he wasn't sure he felt up to walking.

"Let's see if I can hurry, first." Two weeks of not being on his legs made them ache, sore and stiff like the rest of him, and he was leaning heavily on John just to put one foot in front of the other.

"You're the boss." At least while he was sick, anyway. They'd be back to bickering about who got to give the orders soon enough. "C'mon, buddy. Let's get going."

Get going indeed, and Rodney made it all the way to the entrance of the infirmary with John's arm around his waist before Carson caught them, yelled at them both, and put him in the wheelchair himself.

Rodney wasn't sure John hadn't planned it that way just to save his pride. He very possibly had. Rodney could imagine them colluding, and if he could imagine anything at all then he was showing a definite improvement in brain functionality over what he'd had when he'd started to backslide into the Sickness again, lying blearily in bed waiting for John to get off his shift of letting the city Call through him.

By the time they got to their quarters, Rodney was back to being desperate for a bath and damn grateful they'd managed to find one of the places with the shelves in the shower so that he could just sit while he bathed.

"Let's leave this thing out here," John told him, locking the wheels and helping him out of it. "I'll get somebody to take it back for us." He'd just reach out with his mind and the city would respond, would pass on the thought message. The first time it had happened had been amazing.

It was like the city was willing to show itself, show what it _was_ , when there were fewer Terrans there. The smaller the number of them, the more Atlantis breathed. "As long as they don't come into the bathroom, I don't care. Two weeks and no real cleaning..."

The way John snickered wasn't anything like music, wasn't adorable or cute, but it made Rodney smile anyway. "Yeah, you know, that thing where I said they could smell you out in the hall? Not so much a joke."

"I hope Kavanaugh choked." He let John steer, guide and tug him to the ledge that ran on the inside of the shower, and didn't comment when John turned the water on right away, not stopping to get himself undressed quite yet.

"...Yeah," John said, pausing awkwardly. "About Kavanaugh...."

Oh, no. No, no, no. He had been getting better, Rodney had heard it, same as he'd heard that Simpson was getting worse before he did, too.

Oh, God.

"I'm sorry," John said, and leaned close to him, and it didn't matter that they were both wet and still dressed, right down to John's boots. Wet fabric clung to him, and he leaned back in close. Fuck. Fuck. Okay, pushing Kavanaugh's buttons had been a running joke, but there was disliking the man and then there was wanting him to die, having him dead, neither of which he'd wanted because he was at least good at rudimentary chemical compound creation and there were already so few of them from the first expedition.

He'd been getting better. How could Kavanaugh get better and then die when Rodney had struggled and survived? There was no sense, no sanity to it.

"Hey. Hey. I know." John knew. Not _it's okay_ or _it'll be all right_ because they didn't lie to one another like that. It would be stupid and pointless and it really wasn't all right. Sometimes it felt like nothing ever would be again.

John began stripping him and then got himself naked, leaving the pile of their sodden clothing on the shower floor to deal with later. "We thought he was through it. He wasn't." Which was scary because.... "Don't worry. Carson came up with a few new tests to run. You know how much he likes blood." The joke fell flat. "You're gonna be okay, Rodney. I promise."

"I miss when everything going wrong still was a little funny." He tilted his head back, eyes canted to the ceiling, letting the water make them sting. Even they felt gunked, coated and crusted, so a little stinging was all right. It meant he was still alive. "When it all felt like a bad sitcom set in space."

"So does that make you Janet and me Chrissy except, you know. In space?" John had a cloth, and he was washing Rodney's face, scrubbing his shoulders and arms. God, that felt good, made him moan and grumble with the pleasure of that touch. It was almost better than sex, which meant it had been way too long since he'd actually gotten any.

Before the Sickness. There'd been a lot of time together, a lot of time sleeping close, and the contact, the closeness to John was what had made life bearable, but real sex that wasn't fumbling and jerking off? That felt like a fuzzed dream, and the hot water was so much more real, John's fingers soaped up and sliding over his muscles.

"I really think I'm smarter than Chrissy." John's thumbs pressed into his shoulder muscles, and wow. Rodney wouldn't have thought that spending a couple of weeks in bed being sick would amount to that much tension, but it felt incredible. Combined with the hot water, it was loosening him up, in most areas, anyway. "I mean, all things considered."

"Chrissy who?" Rodney let his head drop back further, giving himself up to John's hands and the heat and the subtle smell of soap washing away the grime of sickness. When he felt stronger, he'd return the favor.

"Chrissy. Janet. Jack. Mr. Roper?" John asked, reaching for the bottle of shampoo -- real, honest to god shampoo, even if it was girly Pantene -- and measuring out a dollop. "Didn't you watch tv when you were a kid? _Three's Company_?"

"No. Yes? Yes, actually, it seems familiar. But who's pretending they're gay to live with hot women? It's more like... feigned competency from half the staff to cohabit with space vampires..." John's fingers on his scalp was a soft heaven, a heaven that sounded inside of his skull like scratch scratch scratch.

He was surprised that his foot wasn't tapping.

"Yeah, you like that." There was amusement there. John kept going, leaving the shampoo for a moment while he went back to washing Rodney in bits and pieces, long strokes of the soapy cloth. "You're gonna feel so much better when we get you out and dry."

"And in bed," Rodney sighed. He missed mattresses, even the strange things Ancients did to them, because anything was better than the frame that lay beneath the thin infirmary ones.

John nodded. "C'mon and let me rinse you off." He gently tugged, got Rodney to standing, and the water sluiced it all away, suds and grime and oil. God, it felt good. He wanted to do it again, wanted to wash off again, or sleep under the water like that, but John was already indulging him. Standing up, moving like that, even enjoying the hot water was more tiring than looking at schematics on his laptop. That was something Rodney knew to do to survive, but he hadn't thought of much more than surviving in too long.

The water went off with the flick of John's thoughts, and Rodney sighed, lowering himself back onto the seat to rest. It didn't take long for John to be back with plush towels, the kind that came from Earth, and he was ruffling Rodney's hair, drying him carefully, gently. "C'mon, big guy. Stand up and I'll finish drying you, get you into some clean shorts and a t-shirt."

"Big guy." It made him think of Ronon, Ronon's desperate quick death, and his chest hurt. He wanted to talk to Teyla, see her, see how she was. It could wait for him to get a little sleep first. "Since when am I big, huh?"

The way John laughed was dirty in the extreme, his hand shifting to cup Rodney's cock. "I'd say there's nothing new about that."

Oh, well, then.

"If I can even get it up right now, you can declare it a miracle." Rodney stretched languidly, leaning into one towel once John unfolded it. It was warm, and John's hands were just as gentle drying him as they had been washing him.

"Rumor has it you work miracles on a regular basis," John replied, beginning to ruffle his hair dry.

"This would be you working a miracle." But he was already stirring from the feeling of John just touching him like that. Maybe nothing athletic, but a little sex would be nice. He could sleep for hours afterwards.

John's hand slid down his side, stroking his fingertips over the tops of Rodney's thighs. "On occasion, even I've been known to work a few," he offered, cupping Rodney's balls, his wrist gentle on the base of Rodney's cock. "This could be one of them."

The air in the bathroom was starting to cool, making his skin prickle. Sometimes he'd felt like he'd never be warm again, and he didn't want that feeling to come back. "Let's work miracles in bed." Dry, too. If he could just clutch onto the simple things, life would stay bearable.

"C'mon." He was dry enough even if his hair was damp because it wasn't like hairdryers just plugged into Lantean walls. Rodney remembered laughing because some of the women in the first expedition had actually brought hair dryers with them. Converters were needed just to go to _Europe_ , never mind Pegasus galaxy.

By the time John got him to the bed and bundled in, Rodney had fuzzily contemplated making a Lantean power converter for two and three pronged Earth items, and he was talking about it out loud, so obviously he was more tired than he thought.

"Just need to rework a conduit -- a step down! That's all we'd need, a step down transformer and some old style wiring..." Rodney twisted, reaching his arms for John.

"And about a week's worth of sleep before you manage to completely wear yourself out before you're even better," John warned him. "We'll send some Marines to empty out a couple of Lowes or Home Depots or something. Then you can do whatever you want. For now?" John bundled him under the covers and remained standing, ruffling himself dry quickly. "For now, you're gonna sleep. Doctor's orders."

"What happened to sex?" He only asked out of vague interest, reaching a hand up to paw at John's thigh. "We could use things from hardware stores. Probably better to cut the dependency soon, though."

John caught his hand and gently brought it up to rest on his own chest. "You'll get sex." It was a promise, and the way John pulled him close felt good. He was tired, but he was getting hard, and it felt good. It felt good to be clean; it felt good to be bundled against John, and oh. It felt very good when John's hand slipped between them to catch both of their cocks, sliding them together just a little.

It wasn't intense, it wasn't soul shaking, but it was good. It was comfortable, it was familiar in half remembered ways. He remembered having to hide; he remembered sneaking into places they knew weren't monitored, stealing moments from death and work before the Sickness. This was like it, but at least it wouldn't cost John his job.

"Lemme..." John scrabbled under the pillow, came up with the lube that Carson had probably provided and hey, wow, they should probably hit all of the pharmacies and stuff, too, raid and pillage whatever. Then John's fingers were slick, though, and Rodney whimpered, thrusting into his hand, against his cock, and closed his eyes. "Yeah. Yeah. Just like that. C'mon..."

Come into John's hand, fingers clutching against his shoulders, getting a little traction against John's body so he could move up into his fingers, enjoy the pressure of John's dick against his. God, it had been so _long_ and he'd felt so fucking bad and now, now, now he was going to live, he was going to be allowed to have this all the time, every day if he wanted, kissing if he wanted, making breakfast and bitching about who had to make the coffee, and just the thought of all that domesticity with John, John, _John_....

John, the city, John who was the city, and it was just them and the ghosts of their dead, and it didn't matter because he was hitching his hips hard against John's hand, there already, too soon, but god, he could have it all now only half of what he wanted to be there was gone, fallen away into nothing, so he had to hold all the harder onto John.

"'s okay," John promised, murmuring, and he hadn't come even though Rodney was spilling between them, coming in sticky strands across John's hand and their bellies. "It's okay, buddy. It's, you're gonna be...."

Okay. As close as they got, as close as it ever got in Pegasus, but he didn't say it, didn't finish the words because Rodney decided that they didn't need to be hexed, and leaning up to kiss John hard was better than ruining everything. Kissing John while he was coming was pretty much better than anything in the entire world if anybody asked Rodney. Nobody else was ever going to get the chance, though.

"Christ," John murmured, shuddering. "God, that's..." The fact that he could even talk afterwards was a sign that Rodney was going to need to get well, but. Mmmm. He could relish the moment, drift in the feeling, fingers shifting restlessly on John's shoulders while he slumped back against the mattress.

He must have fallen asleep once he settled back because John was there when he opened his eyes, wiping him clean, his touch gentle and easy. "Now you wake up," John teased him. "Close your eyes. I'm just washing you off a little so you won't be stuck to yourself when you wake up."

"Tired of doing that." Waking up with his cheek stuck to the sheets, eyes stuck to themselves, lid against lid. He was just happy to be clean again. John's damp fingers cupped his face as he closed his eyes, and Rodney sighed. He was so drowsy, and he felt so good, and....

~*~*~*~

Kansas in mid-summer was a bitch. Worse, it was flat, and everything, absolutely _everything_ , smelled like dead cows. Why the cows and dogs had died but the cats and deer were all right, Cheyenne couldn't guess. Neither could Jimmy, but there it was.

The little girl still wasn't talking but at least she'd let Cheyenne wash her face and brush her hair, and she figured she could live with that accomplishment.

They picked up another couple of people along the way -- a guy with a hideous mustache and the worst glasses she'd ever seen anyone wear in the history of spectacles, and a teenager who seemed almost as traumatized as the little girl. She had mumbled something about escaping, about a group of men gathering people like themselves, survivors, and torturing them to death, or worse.

They'd stopped in a local sporting goods place and picked up guns the next time they'd gotten close enough to a town. The smell had been just as bad as Cheyenne had feared it would be.

She was getting used to it, as used to it as anyone could get to the smell of bodies left out in the sun, of rot and decay. The smell would have to stop soon, because the people who'd died would eventually decay away. Jimmy had said that, held the words out like a shield in front of him as they'd loaded up with supplies enough for all of them for a while. They'd grabbed first aid stock, rummaged through the pharmacy for antibiotics and a few painkillers just in case. They wouldn't be able to deal with anything more serious and they knew it.

The truck had gotten too small so they switched it out with another SUV, a bigger one this time. The guy with the mustache, Dove, he said he knew how to get gas from the underground tanks at stations, and so that had helped a hell of a lot. It had cut travel time, and they'd stopped getting out at any kind of pile-up at all after somebody shot at them from the middle of one. Instead they drove through medians and cut through fields if they had to, working their way back around to roads that would take them into Colorado.

It didn't work nearly as well once they made it into the mountains. When cars had just stopped in mountain passes, crashed into each other because their drivers had died, it was more of a problem than in flatlands where there was an option. Dove and Jimmy were ingenious, though, and she and the younger girl held shotguns at the ready while they tried to move cars over the edge of cliffs, through busted out guardrails.

They didn't feel guilty about sending the corpses down into the valleys.

They did feel guilty about having to kill the people who tried to snatch the little girl while they were busy clearing the latest complete fucking disaster.

By the time they made it to Colorado Springs, they were all harder and not nearly as sure of themselves. They had admitted to the Dreams, talked about them. None of the others seemed to think about or see the people Calling the same way that she did, but it didn't matter so much. They were Dreaming, and that was the important part.

It wasn't a hallucination, even if everyone thought of the people in the dreams as different names. It was what they knew, she figured. Dove said he thought of the one guy like a buddy. Reminded him of an old army friend, just that kind of guy, and while they talked around the fire at night before deciding who took what watch, she tried to match the people they talked about to her own Dream-memories.

The little girl still hadn't said anything.

The teenager had whispered her name one night -- Julie -- and said something about the one Cheyenne thought of as Bubby. Said he made her think of her uncle Moony, and she'd been calling him that ever since.

It did seem sort of appropriate.

It was late afternoon when they drove into town, and one thing was pretty obvious. There were live people there, everywhere. Big trucks were being loaded up at Lowes, at Home Depot, at every big store in town. The people looked military, and it made Cheyenne nervous, but Dove stopped with them all the same.

That was when they learned where they were going.

That was when they learned about Atlantis.

~*~*~*~

John was a more smothering doctor than Carson had ever aspired to be.

It was sweet and well meaning, and Rodney knew all of that intellectually. John brought him lunch, and they ate breakfast and dinner together, but he wouldn't let Rodney off of bed rest until Carson said otherwise. He gave him a laptop, yes, but firing off angry interdepartmental mails when people didn't do exactly as he'd requested wasn't nearly as satisfying as telling them in person.

He was dying again, just from boredom this time.

"You know, if you're whining this much, you must feel better." John had lunch, and it was good lunch, too, some of that not-quite-cow thing they'd found on PR7-8G4, all made into tasty meatloaf with mashed potatoes and... ooo, were those the creamy field peas he'd had once when he was a visiting lecturer at Duke? They were.

"I _do_ feel better, which is why you need to let me start to work again." He could almost full articulate John's argument against it, because John wanted him full rested and really healthy, not Rodney's idea of healthy.

"You're still coughing in your sleep, you need to gain back a good twenty pounds, and you're so staying in bed until the coughing stops and you've got enough rest." That smirk said it all, and Rodney wanted to yell. Instead, he snatched up his fork and glared.

"Then I'm going to make the most of the fact that you're still bringing your prisoner food." John poked his leg with the back end of the fork, and shifted his own tray so he could balance it more comfortably.

That smirk turned into a grin, as if John couldn't help himself. "Yeah, well, if you're really good, I'll bring home a couple pairs of handcuffs," he offered, eyebrows wriggling.

"So you're keeping me prisoner in the hopes of making me your sex slave. Teyla's going to be awfully disappointed in you." Teyla who'd come by after breakfast to hand him a list of people who were on the mainland and had claimed to have some kind of scientific and engineering qualifications. The obvious ones were the ones they'd already taken into the city, but he was willing to bet there were others.

She'd looked so hollow and still so dignified, that strange alien poise that made him think of Wraith-queen divas. There were so few of the Athosians left now -- a handful like Teyla, who'd had Wraith DNA, kids who had gotten the gene therapy, a few adults. A tiny population dwindled down to ten percent didn't make up much.

"I've always wanted my own sex slave. I mean, I come home from a hard day at the office, and there you are, ass in the air, all lubed up and ready to..." The sound of a voice filtered vaguely from John's comm. He reached up and tapped it. "This is Sheppard." Rodney could make out the voice, but not what it was saying. What he could tell was the way that John went white, then colored, then paled again. "We'll be right down. Sheppard out."

"What? What, were you talking into an open channel?" He was thirty seconds from leaning forwards over lunch to punch John, because no one needed to hear about John's not so secret gay fantasies.

"Pull on some pants, McKay. We're going down to the control room, now."

Fuck. Rodney shoved the tray over to the other side of the mattress, and hopped out of bed after a struggle with the sheets that John sat on until, oh, very convenient, until Rodney was standing up and didn't need him to move. "Fine, fine. Don't tell me what's going on."

"Pants, Rodney. _Pants_ ," John urged, putting both trays on the desk shoved in one corner to hold three laptops. He scrambled for Rodney's tennis shoes, not bothering to find socks. One day, Rodney was going to hold him down and force him into wearing socks just for the fun of it, but he wasn't up to it today. Instead he squirmed into a pair of pants and grabbed one of his science shirts hurriedly. The motion made him a little dizzy and he ended up sitting down quickly in a chair, but that made it easier for John to help him shove on his shoes.

He jammed them on like the world was going to end. Again. If there was a plague taking out the gene carriers who'd stayed behind in Cheyenne Mountain, he was going to, going to... "Pants are on, now what's going on?"

"It's not the end of the world. It's just a surprise, and we need to hurry. Now c'mon, zip up. I'll tell you the rest about me riding your ass hard later." It was a promise, and it sounded like a good one.

Rodney really hoped the surprise was, too.

Not the world ending if John could still be an asshole, teasing him about sex.

He stood, zipped up, but had to use John's arm to brace himself. "Seriously, you could just tell me..."

"Seriously, I'm so not. Don't get your panties in a twist, McKay. Just. You know." John grinned at him, and Rodney knew. He knew it was going to be so good, the best thing ever, and he was afraid to get his hopes up. "Just come on."

Rodney grabbed his hand, and he went.

It was a longer walk than Rodney remembered and everyone was clustered around the control tower now, just like when they'd first come to the city. It was safer, closer to the shielding and the power grid's most stable parts. It still felt like a long forever of walking to get to the control room. Maybe John wasn't so wrong to keep him in bed a little while longer, because he was completely worn out by the time they got there.

"Rodney!" That was Carson calling, down in the bevy of humanity filling up the gateroom floor. It was supposed to be one of the last groups coming through before they started abandoning Earth.

"UNCLE MER!" a shrill voice screamed, and his knees almost went out from under him. She was _there_ , Madison, _there_ , flying through people, running up the central staircase, and he was on his knees with no idea how he got there.

He got there because John was right, he needed his rest, but Madison was there and all he could do was clutch his arms around her, holding her tight. Madison was alive, dirty, tired, dragged out, but she was still Madison and if she was there alone then it meant his sister and her husband were dead because they loved her with everything they had. There was no way they would have let Madison go anywhere without them until she was eighteen and possibly not even then, but god.

God, she was real. She was _real_ and in his arms, and he didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to do, but he had her, her wet dirty face tucked against his neck, and he wasn't going to let her go.

There wasn't much left. Not Elizabeth, not Ronon, not Kavanaugh or Carter. Not Jeannie or Kaleb, not his first girlfriend, or his last boyfriend before leaving Earth.

He had Maddie, though. He had Maddie, clutched tight, and John beside him, refugees swirling around, being herded into the right places. He had important things left, important people, people he loved.

It would be enough.


End file.
